Historical exposition

I believe that there are four main types of historical exposition.

First, there is analysis, which takes recorded facts and expounds them according to assumed causal or logical connections. Analysis may be given according to the synthetic method, giving first the causes and then the effects, or the analytic method, giving first the effects and moving on to the causes. But this is a difference of style, and both methods are nevertheless historical analysis.

Second, there is conjecture, which proposes facts beyond what is recorded. Conjecture is divided into abductive conjecture, analytic conjecture, and synthetic conjecture.

Abductive conjecture proposes possible causes for a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a sudden disappearance of a people was due to epidemic disease, although there are no traces of the disease left. Analytic conjecture proposes possible components of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a recorded stabbing was done with daggers, although the source does not mention the particular weapons. Synthetic conjecture proposes possible effects of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that an epidemic caused the afflicted population to save less of their income for the distant future, since their survival was uncertain, although there is no record of the amount of their savings.

All history involves at least some conjecture, since it must be supposed that at least some of the known records are truly records and not fabrications, which is an abductive conjecture, albeit often highly certain.

Legend, myth, and fiction (added 2022-11-30)

In view of the terms just mentioned, I have found it useful to distinguish myths and legends from purely historical narratives, as well as purely fictional narratives.

A narrative exposition may propose facts that have no connection with any given facts; such proposals are not to be called conjectural but arbitrary, and insofar as a narrative does this, it is not historical but legendary.

Insofar as a narrative proposes facts, whether arbitrary or conjectural, that are incomprehensible either by concepts of experience, or by a definite analogy with those concepts, such a narrative is mythical. So, by this division, some myths are legends, and some legends are myths, but not all.

A narrative is purely fictional when it is not intended to be connected with present experience by a chain of efficient causes.

Emotions are not beliefs

Emotions can happen at the same time as beliefs, and can cause them as well as be caused by them. That said, everyone knows that emotions are not beliefs. This fact has some consequences which I have found useful to list and explain in detail.

• They are physiological, not rational
• They cannot be justified, only expected
• They cannot be true, only proper
• They have causes, not reasons

They are physiological, not rational

The main difference between emotions and beliefs is that emotions are never caused by your reasoning processes, but by your animal instincts. Accordingly, it is possible for things such as hunger, tiredness, hormones and medications to affect your emotions. This is useful to keep in mind.

They cannot be justified, only expected

It is a common teaching that a belief, if properly caused, can be called knowledge; this is called the justification of the belief. But since emotions are not beliefs, they cannot be justified in that sense. Your emotions can never be called knowledge, although you can know that you felt them. Since they are not even caused by your rational processes, they are certainly not derived as conclusions from your surroundings; they can only be caused by your body’s instincts in an expected or an unexpected way.

They cannot be true, only proper

Beliefs can be true or false, but emotions cannot. We believe, of course, that some emotions are appropriate in some circumstances, such as grief when someone dies. This is a combination of the emotions being expected in the former sense – due to human instinct – and “cultural expectations”, i.e., social norms that require some emotions at some times. Still, properly speaking, the emotions are not true or false; unlike beliefs, they do not represent anything to you, so they cannot be accurate or inaccurate.

They have causes, not reasons

Philosophers usually distinguish between reasons, which only beliefs can have, and causes, which emotions (and other events) can also have. Laypeople tend to ignore this distinction, but it is useful, especially when you are feeling strong emotions. Your beliefs about the past have reasons, which are your memories of the past. They should, accordingly, continue to be believed as long as the reason remains, i.e., as long as the memory remains. Your emotions, by contrast, were caused by events in the past, but the events are not still reasons for them. It is perfectly right, and probably advisable, to stop feeling them as soon as possible.

Impartial journalism

I have thought for some years about whether the idea of journalistic impartiality even makes sense. Recently, a friend helped me see it in a new way.

0. Contents

• 1. The abstract problem
• 1.1. Item presentation
• 1.2. Item selection
• 2. The concrete problem
• 2.1. Cable news
• 2.2. Cable news watchers
• 3. Solutions

1. The abstract problem

In the consideration of a subject which may be examined with impartiality, but cannot be viewed with indifference…

— Gibbon, Decline and Fall, §20

I had usually thought about journalistic impartiality as an abstract problem. It is difficult enough to define what it would even mean for a newspaper to be presented “objectively” or “impartially”, especially if this is meant to be attainable. Usually, no one cares enough to be rigorous, and people will simply state, without argument, that journalism either can or can’t be impartial, and that it either should or shouldn’t try to do so. I thought for a while that I had a pretty fair case for the conclusion that it is impossible, and this is what I will present next.

1.1. Item presentation

Though I could not always present it so concisely, I believe my argument went something like this:

1. “Impartiality” should be defined as neutrality with respect to different possible worldviews.
2. Every decision about how to write something is a human decision, and must have a reason, whether conscious or not.
3. It is impossible for this reason to be perfectly neutral with respect to all worldviews.
4. So, it is impossible for any decision about how to write something to be neutral and impartial.

I thought this argument was pretty good, but it nevertheless does inevitably seem that a lot of things are written without any partiality. Maybe the “trade jargon” of journalism prevents partiality somehow. Which is why the following was also important to me.

1.2. Item selection

Even if a news item can possibly be presented impartially, it is clear that a parallel argument can be made about how to select which news items to report, and what kind of emphasis to give them – as in deciding, for instance, whether an item is front page material or not. Given different newspapers with different items and emphases, someone would be hard pressed to claim that any one selection and ordering of items is “the objectively most important news to the public”. Clearly, then, the selection and ordering of items must reflect some point of view, even if the language inside reports somehow does not.

2. The concrete problem

Inner psychological states are never accessible to the historian.

— Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, §3

It turns out that the problem of journalistic partiality has quite a different nature when addressed concretely. My best friend, who does not usually look at cable news, ended up having to watch some recently, and she told me the problems she saw with it, which I thought was insightful.

2.1. Cable news

The problem is that networks such as Fox News habitually do the following:

1. Impute motives to people that they have not actually stated (e.g., “X politician is trying to do XYZ”)
2. Report events in a way that is obviously interpretive, regarding moral or aesthetic value (and often inflammatory, e.g. “X politician is using Y group as pawns”)

This is the typical way that they talk about anything, as opposed to there being a separation between “news”, where this is not done, and “commentary”, where this is done; even the running on-screen headlines will have statements of this sort.

2.2. Cable news watchers

In my experience, this actually makes it harder for habitual watchers of such sensationalist content – whether on Fox News or on certain YouTube channels – to see things from any other perspective than their own. Since this is the main way they hear about news, they have a harder time separating the facts from the values that come with them.

Since the content is often meant to arouse anger and other strong emotions, people who watch it often feel such emotions about the content, and have a harder time thinking and talking calmly about contemporary politics. They often fiercely hate their political opponents, and can sometimes find them unbearable.

Also, the habit of ascribing bad motives to political enemies seems to make some people really believe that a large proportion of people with opposing politics really do act with bad intentions a lot of the time. They are led to think that our opponents have no conscience, and are conspiring to destroy the things we hold dear; that they are evil, and are out to get us.

I have seen these effects in some other people, and also in myself. They are defects in thought.

3. Solutions

The solution, then, to the concrete problem, is simply to avoid such value and intention judgments in news reporting, as well as displays of emotion. It is much less difficult than the abstract problem, which is probably unsolvable. News publications can probably easily be impartial in the sense of only reporting observable things, and leave their particular interpretations to a dedicated editorial section.

There is, of course, no incentive for cable news networks or sensationalist YouTube channels to change their ways at all. I believe that the first to do so would simply lose its public to the remaining sensationalists. The public that watches these things is probably simply not interested in impartial reporting; for such people, I suppose the only hope is that some external reason will cause them to grow more mature, so that they will grow tired of such content and abandon it.

European marriage pattern causes preliminary research

Just earlier today, I found out about the so-called “European marriage pattern” (EMP) and “Hajnal line”. The latter seems less supported by data than the former. Please look at the linked Wikipedia articles to find out what they are.

This got me curious about the possible causes of marriage patterns, generally, and the EMP specifically. (Much of the controversy seems to be about its effects, i.e., whether the EMP leads to improved economic growth or not.) While it would be good to properly think this through from principles, I wanted to see what theories have been raised about it. From a cursory search, apparently there have been the following:

• Racial and biological theories.— The “Hajnal line” Wikipedia article makes several mentions of racist theories about the line; they apparently rely on the line itself being factually supported, which is questionable. The idea seems to be that the Slavic peoples, for reasons inherent to their race, favor a reproductive strategy used by species whose offspring are individually expendable, such as certain insects; so-called r/K selection would seem to be related here. (Personally, I find such theories distasteful, but given how cursory my research has been so far, I have no arguments against them.)
• Catholic Christian culture and regulations.— The Catholic Church seems to have had various internal regulations and theological ideas which favor the marriage habits corresponding to the EMP, and nuclear families generally. These explanations are covered at some length in the “Western European marriage pattern” Wikipedia article, and in this Mises Institute article.
• The Black Death.— This other Mises Institute article cites, in passing, a different theory “that the Black Death aided the EMP by trigging a labor market for women.” A 2013 academic article by Tracy Dennison (PDF), focusing mostly on the EMP’s effects, also mentions the idea that “in England after the Black Death, it is claimed, labour scarcity and a shift from arable to pastoral agriculture increased demand for women’s labour outside the household, encouraging a move towards late marriage, high lifetime celibacy, and a calibration of marriage decisions to economic fluctuations.”
• Corporative institutions.— The just-cited Dennison article (PDF) also seems to mention how “strong corporative institutions (communities, guilds, universities, firms) which benefited economic growth by guaranteeing property rights, enforcing contracts, and facilitating exchange” made it easier to have a network of people you trust without a large family. This is mainly claimed to be an effect, but also apparently a cause, of the EMP.

That’s all I have seen for now. These things might all be part of the answer (though I wouldn’t consider the first one). As the following passage from the Dennison article (PDF) highlights, however, the range of currently available theories seems unsatisfying, and more work should probably be done:

No variant of this new literature unambiguously spells out the direction of the causal relationships involved. On the one hand, the EMP is supposed to have created a better position for women. But on the other, greater female autonomy is supposed to have given rise to the EMP. And in some variants, both marriage patterns and women’s position are ascribed to underlying factors such as European or Christian cultural norms, the Black Death, or pastoral agriculture. The evident endogeneity of the different variables limits the scope of these claims to the merely descriptive assertion that the EMP was associated with a higher status for women, which in turn benefited the economy.

But even this claim is at odds with the evidence. As the women’s history literature has shown, women had a good economic position in some societies with the EMP and a bad one in others. [...]

Influential minority

Suppose that a minority of people has a strong influence on how the majority votes.

You could think either that:

• (A) This is a bad thing, because this influence presents a strong danger that the people are being fooled into voting for the interests of this minority group instead of their own interests. Without this influence, there is a greater chance that the interests of the majority will decide the laws, which is the ideal.
• (B) This is a good thing, because the majority of people do not know much about laws, so that their only hope of voting in good laws is by being influenced by a group of more knowledgeable people. Without this, they will vote ignorantly, and be governed by bad laws.
• (C) This makes no difference, because a minority can only be popular with the majority by saying what the majority already thinks.

It is probably inevitable that all of these sides will show up whenever there is an influential minority, according to whether someone likes them or not.

Ceptibilism

I have given a fun name to my opinion that words such as “existence” and “knowledge” have exactly two meanings, corresponding to the two mental powers of sensation and reason. Playing on the fact that the former may be called “perception” and the latter “conception”, I have shaved off the prefix, arriving at the neat phrasing that existence is “ceptibility”, i.e., it is indifferent between the conceivable and the perceivable, unless one of the senses of the word is specified. My opinion is that when we say that something exists or that we know it, we mean either that we have perceived it through the senses or that we formed a concept of it. (This is also what we are denying when we deny that something exists, or that we or others know it.) Since we have either conceived it or perceived it, we may be said to have “ceived” it, as a retrogressive coinage.

I think a lot of philosophical debates are very vague because we don’t specify which sense of these words we’re using. Atheists deny that God exists because they are using the word “exists” in the sense of perception, but almost all theists agree that God can’t be perceived with the senses, and they only use the word “exists” in a different sense, although they don’t notice it, because both sides insist on talking about “existence” without defining it.

Only the name is new. This opinion was mentioned before in the following blog posts:

• Descartes’s confusions
• Controverted Questions
• Kantian terminology
• Kant vocabulary equivalence project
• Existence of God
• Glossary

Existence of God

I explain in what sense I understand the sentence “God exists”, and why I think it is true in the sense I mean it.

This blog post was first written as a series of text messages to an atheist friend who thought that he simply had no reason to believe it. I have edited it very little from what I sent to him, so the tone may be unusual.

First, notice that, for most of history, people have thought that they can prove that “God exists” is true from pure philosophy; and I think so too, but you have to understand the words right. It is obviously false if by “God” you mean a bearded man in the sky, for instance; there are many true, and many false meanings of it. I’ll explain what I mean by the words, and why I think my sense is good enough for all the mainstream religions, although some staunch bearded-man-believers would hate me for meaning what I do by it. Alright? ...

0. Contents

• 1. What God is said to be
• 2. That the forms exist
• 3. What the form of the good is
• 4. That the form of the good is God
• 5. Epilogue

1. What God is said to be

OK, so first we have “God”. The most ecumenical senses of the word, I think, are these two.

Sense A: The principle/cause of all other things, which is distinct from them and superior to them. (Wuellner)

This is usually what “arguments for God’s existence” are proving, and the most abstract philosophers have this in common with any religious grandmas. The latter two restrictions would exclude most kinds of ‘pantheism’ from counting here.

Sense B: Something “absolutely perfect” in some sense, usually including being perfectly morally good, all-powerful, all-knowing etc.

This one is also common. I would say that my sense of the word “God” fits both of these two common senses, which is good, since that means I’m not just making up a new sense for the word. I wouldn’t usually define God using these phrases, but what I mean by the word fits both of them. I’ll explain “exists” next.

2. That the forms exist

Now, the funny thing about “exists” is most people never define it, and they just talk about things existing and not existing without explaining what they mean, and I think that is what causes a lot of confusion nowadays. This is especially because I think there are two main senses of the word, so I am going to define both of them.

Sense 1: something exists if it can be perceived with the senses.

I think everyone agrees with this; you and I exist, and so on. I think when people are sure that God doesn’t exist, they are thinking that this is the only sense. But I think there’s the other one too.

Sense 2: something exists if it can be understood with reason.

In this sense, you can say that perfect circles exist, and the set of natural numbers exists, even though you’ve never seen them, but it remains true that married bachelors and other nonsense don’t exist. In this sense, we have to say that unicorns exist, although that’s weird, so we rarely do – to avoid ambiguity, we stick to sense 1 when talking about those.

Now, I think those are really the only senses of “exist”, since we human beings don’t have any other mental powers besides the senses and reason. And almost all the theologians agree that God doesn’t exist in sense 1 – it says in the book of John that “no one has ever seen God” (1:18), but even taking only the usual interpretations of the Old Testament, it is usually held that God doesn’t have any physical body, and the times he “appeared” to people were just visions that represented him. So I think you can only go forward with the proof if you agree that sense 2 is a good sense to use the word “exists”. And if that’s fine with you, then I’ll explain how you can understand one thing that fits both senses of “God”, although maybe you’re beginning to get it already.

3. What the form of the good is

I think the way we understand things is we form concepts in our minds, and those concepts are what we are expressing when we give definitions. Now, I think there is one most important concept that is involved with all the others. Plato called it “the form of the Good”, which is very awesome, but maybe not very useful. Sometimes I say it’s “being”, which is also not very clear. But basically it would be the concept of the “intelligible” or understandable or conceivable – it’s one concept, or form, that includes everything that exists in sense 2. Alright? This concept includes all the other concepts, just like the concept of “animal” includes all your ideas of each kind of animal.

4. That the form of the good is God

Now, if you take this central concept, or highest form, you see that it fits Sense A of “God” in a certain way – it is the cause of all things that you understand, insofar as you understand them, since it is involved in your understanding of all of them. Just like your concept of dog is the cause of there being any dogs in your life, since otherwise you couldn’t understand all those shapes and colors as dogs. So it’s the cause of all things insofar as they are intelligible; if you take sense 2 to be the truest sense of existing, which I think Plato did, then that’s perfectly sufficient. (After all, whatever exists in sense 2 has always existed in sense 2, so that’s a more “eternal” way to exist; and since sense 1 concerns “appearance” to your senses, we can say that, by contrast, sense 2 concerns “reality”.) This central concept is superior to the other concepts because it includes all of them, and it’s distinct from them when taken by itself, although it’s part of all of them.

It also fits sense B of “God”, again, only when taken by itself. This is harder to understand, but the idea is that “perfection” would be something fitting the concept. So a perfect dog is a dog that perfectly fits the concept of dog, while a defective dog would depart from the definition in some ways, e.g., dogs are quadrupeds, and the poor pooch only has three legs. Similarly, a morally bad man is departing from the concept of man because we understand that human beings are rational, and being immoral is irrational. Alright? That’s how classical philosophy works. Anyway, so, every concept perfectly fits itself, of course —the concept of dogness is a perfect dog, although particular dogs aren’t perfect— and if you take the universal concept by itself, it obviously has to include every possible perfection, since it includes every other concept – just like how “animals”, taken generally, can do anything that particular animals can do. So the central concept is absolutely perfect too.

5. Epilogue

That’s how I would understand “God exists” in a way that fits both of the common religious ideas about it. Many people would dislike it, but I think it’s pretty good, and good enough for the main religions. Maybe this leaves you a bit confused regarding prayer and miracles, but I can try to explain if you ask a question. If you don’t want to buy all these theories about how thoughts and reason work, then I guess there isn’t much I can do, but I tried.

Anyway, believing that “God exists” in some sense wouldn’t mean you’re a member of any religion, but you have to believe it in order to even be able to believe that a message is from God, right? So it’s a start.

Although you could technically stop there, if you wanted; there are many philosophers who believe it and aren’t in any religion. This seems less common nowadays than in early modern times, but it’s a thing. (I do have an idea of which religion you should join, of course.)